Hidden City

Poliakoff's first film as writer/director, at least partly inspired by an article in Time Out on Secret London, in particular a building in Wandsworth which was used for the interrogation of prisoners during the war. The film bristles with deceptively mundane settings - tunnels, shafts, tearooms, workmen's huts - all throwing up secrets of the surveillance trade. Not merely the Le Carré kind either, but the sort which affects all of us in the end. The thriller plot in which Charles Dance and Cassie Stuart track down one of these secrets is chilling enough, but far less powerful than the superb use of real locations and the mazy, hazy recreation of a modern city of computers, chicanery and dark secrets. The sort of movie that ensures you never feel secure walking down the street again.